In making the key decisions about how to design and present online course material, whether to use synchronous or asynchronous learning tools, and how to organize the material, we often run into the question of whether to use discussion forums. Most online courses nowadays seem to utilize them in some way, and most learning institutions would defend that they are effective means of communicating the course material. But, have they ever been evaluated for effectiveness? What kinds of course material might they be most effective for?
I went online this week in a search for some research to answer this question. Rather than just searching the internet for magazine articles or editorials, I actually went into the PSU library system looking for a scholarly journal article. I found the following article to be most relevant to my search, and I reviewed it as a means of trying to answer my questions about whether or not to use online discussion forums in an online course structure.
Curran, J.A., & Abidi, S.S.R. (2007). Evaluation of an online discussion forum for emergency practitioners Health Informatics Journal, 13(4), 255-266. Retrieved from: http://jhi.sagepub.com/content/13/4/255
This article evaluated the outcomes of using an asynchronous online discussion forum to share knowledge between emergency healthcare practitioners. The idea is that emergency healthcare clinicians don’t really get the chance to engage in relevant and meaningful interactions about practice knowledge, because the nature of their job is such that they are constantly interrupted and splitting their attention while on the job responding to emergencies. So, the authors implemented an asynchronous online discussion forum of the type found on Communities of Practice, to help the practitioners engage in dialogue around topics relevant to their practice learning needs. Then, the authors evaluated whether this online discussion forum served as an effective means of knowledge seeking, knowledge sharing, and knowledge organization between emergency healthcare practitioners.
The measurement of effectiveness of the communications on the discussion forum was done by using both quantitative statistics about the network posts (demographic analysis), and then a qualitative topic analysis (content analysis) of the content of those posts, and a social network analysis to show the knowledge-seeking relationships amongst those in the medical community. The 3 analyses revolved around measuring episodes of information seeking or sharing. Descriptive statistics showed that across 250 total postings, there were 52 information seeking episodes, and 63 information sharing episodes. Content analysis results showed that the pediatric trauma, conscious sedation, poison management and asthma and airway topics were of greatest interest to participants. Social network analysis showed that the rural health center practitioners most often sought knowledge from the urban health center practitioners, but within a health center there was a unilateral sharing of information. Conclusions were that, given the opportunity, emergency practitioners will take advantage of an online discussion forum to seek and share knowledge and information that is clinically relevant to their practice.
This article was interesting in that it did the same thing as I’m attempting to do in my research, which was to assess the interactions that take place in an online Community of Practice. The research was limited only to the discussion forum of their online Community, but their method of measuring the interactions both quantitatively and qualitatively was similar. I was disappointed that the article purported to measure the effectiveness of the interactions, but really I didn’t see a rubric created or any way to truly measure whether the interaction was effective. It was simply categorized as either information seeking or sharing, and then the social network analysis was done to see whom the interactions were between. So, while overall this article showed initial similarities with my research, it ultimately ended up being a lot more about social network analysis than it originally purported to be. That was how the authors measured “effectiveness” of the interactions, which to my mind is not really the way it should be measured. However, I’ve done quite a bit of social network analysis work in my professional life, and the methods used here are sound. The findings were not revolutionary, but the study is a good foray into measuring social networks. But, not so much in measuring effectiveness of discussion forum posts.
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